"She had expected to encounter death as a kind of existential depth and had been disappointed. But maybe there was a deeper truth there. Maybe profundity actually is a mode of disappointment. The rhythm of the climax—joy and despair, sex and pain—is of course the currency of life. Death can only ever be a sort of anticlimactic belatedness."

“It had to be one or the other. Did it have to be one or the other? Even the question as to whether it had to be one or the other had to be one or the other!”

““I shouldn’t be naive” Diana said. “Of course, realising its destructive power only makes them want it more. Of course. Even more than great wealth, power craves technologies of destruction. Good to be wealthy, but better to remain in power—and the more awe-inspiring the weaponry at your disposal, the better able you are to do that.”

““I avoid all political complications,” said Cloche, with a severe expression. “Of whatever stripe. I only wish that political complications would similarly avoid me, and my work.”

“Let us not entirely abandon Occam’s Razor! The possible, no matter how unlikely, is always to be preferred to the impossible, however appealing.”

“One of the curiosities of anger, of course, is that the more you focus it outward, firing it at the injustices of the world, the more it actually parses your own self-pity and resentment.”

“Jack considered: there were worse things that could happen than him dying. Of course, there were much better things, too.”